ForeignPolicy.com columnist James Traub and former U.S. Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg join “Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer to discuss Mitt Romney’s response to the deadly attack on an American consulate in Libya. Romney criticized what he thought was a “response” to the attacks in Libya and Egypt, when in fact the message in question — a tweet from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo — had been posted online several hours before the attacks even began. The embassy tweet, in calling for religious tolerance, seemed to be an attempt to stave off any violence.
“I thought it was horrifying,” Traub says of Romney’s criticism. “[Romney] doesn’t seem to have a sense of the weight or the substance of the moment.”
“This plays into the narrative of what I see going on in [Romney's] foreign policy operation,” Ginsberg says. “He has a foreign policy operation that essentially hoped that they would be able to create the narrative that what Obama has been is an apologist for America’s weakness abroad. And when the president kept using drone strikes, got bin Laden, has gone after — effectively gone after — al-Qaida, he robbed them of their greatest weapon against him.”
